Thanks, Rap. Pttthhhtthhhttt. You were too late. They're already awake and distributed around the house and yard. Your noisy window didn't wake them.

These two are funny. I had to haul the pitbull to the back door this morning, with the catahoula protesting from her enclosure all the while. They are counting the days on their little doggie calendars until the stitches are removed (a week from today, in a half hour from now) so they can go face to face as peers in the back yard.

This new dog is so far a little space cadet. I can only guess at the home she came from--she is house trained, but little else.

Do you think Gluon is lonely? Maybe Amos should investigate finding a companion for her. Any more duck-dogs floating around the Earth's orbit that you might entice into your neighborhood? (I sure wouldn't want to be the one to be the pooper scooper behind two of them, though!)

To maintain parity, and so prevent the universe tipping over as it's unbalanced, which would be bad, as my keyboard alredy has coffee in it, plus time might start running backwards or sideways or something, there was a dog-duck created at the same point as Gluon.

To distinguish it from Gluon, we will call it Boson. This is an easier rhyme than the other viable alternative of 'semi-mythical Higgs particle'

For the last couple of days I've been catching whiffs of a vaguely familiar odor. "What's that damned smell?" I'd ask myself every few minutes. "I don't think it's something burning. Smells more like something chemical. What the hell is it?"

Finally, I recognized it as being very similar to the smell given off by PVC pipe when you cut it. "But I haven't done any plumbing work for months." I said to myself, "Maybe it's from that oil processing plant a few miles down the road." (Have I ever mentioned that there are a bunch of oil wells around here?) But my wife couldn't smell anything so that sorta dashed that idea.

Then I noticed that the odor was more pronounced when I was at the computer. "Oh, hell!" I thought, "The friggin' computer's melting." So I took the cover off the computer and sniffed around. Nothing.

"All right," I thought, "it's obvious that I'm losing my mind. I've always heard that olfactory hallucinations are the first indications of the onset of schizophrenia. This must be it. Time to head off to Chattahoochee and do the Thorazine Shuffle with the rest of the loonies."

So, while I was taking a break from searching for downloadable Power of Attorney forms so my wife could take care of my affairs while I was off being Chief Broom, I took off the reading glasses that I have to wear for computer work and noticed that the smell went away. Put 'em back on, the smell came back. "Aha!" I mentally exclaimed, "It's the damned nosepads on these new el cheapo reading glasses! They're made of a PVC-related plastic! I'm not whacko! Well... not whacko enough to be Baker Acted... yet."

I just hope the smell goes away as the things age and the plastic finishes curing. Sorta hard to ignore it when it's on your nose.

At least no one can accuse you of missing an answer that was right under your nose.

I'm glad you were paying attention, Amos. I saw the looming number but went and took a little nap to nip a sinus headache in the bud. It didn't work as well as usual, as there seems to be a large atmospheric disturbance in the area. Several folks I've spoken with here today have been dealing with sinus headaches. My forehead doesn't differentiate between humongous hurricanes and simple shifts as thunderstorms drift through, so I don't think I can sell this as a job skill or anything (you know, like one of those USDA food sniffers).

Gluon is not the type to keep his butt on the floor, no matter HOW desirable the reward. His nature is to be a herding force for subatomic particles. Back when he was in the employ of the Fermi Lab gang, he once herded three times 10 to the 12th power of protons all the way from Chicago to Florida, for delivery to the NASA crowd down there, for a science experiment scheduled to lift off in the nosecone of one of the early Atlas shots.

Out here there are dogs that are supposed to work cattle, but don't, really. Their called blue heelers, and they're a cowboy's best friend. You can see them riding around in pickups or barking at visitors to the ranches and just generally making nuisances of themselves.

But just outside of American Falls there used to be one who was a real benefit to the community. Every election day, the dog would be taken into town by his owned and turned over to the Board of Elections. The Board would then turn him loose and he would round up every voter in town and chivvy them down to the polls. This dog was so smart and his nose so educated that he only brought each person of voting age in once. After he'd rounded up everyone in one ward, the Board took him to the next to do the same thing. He was indeed a true ward heeler.

Doellman: Fencing, marksmanship, and archery. Individually, not all at once.

ISJ: What was the best day of your life?

Doellman: Oct. 6, 1973, ranks right up there with Feb. 11, 1945.

ISJ: The worst day?

Doellman: April 14, 1981, the day my mother died.

ISJ: What was the best piece of advice you ever received?

Doellman: There are lots more than just one: Do the best you can and don't worry about it. Skedaddle while they reload. If you don't try you'll never know if you can. Don't take yourself too seriously. Be nice to folks you meet on the way up, because you'll meet them again on the way down. If not you, who? Eat what's set before you. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. It's never too late to mutate.

There were originally 40 questions, and they picked twenty. It was a blatant case of censorship! Ideas were stifled, snuffed out like a candle in a hurricane, never given a chance to bloom, to inspire future generations. My best answers were trampled upon, ground into the mud! But they will rise! Die Gedanken sind frei!

For instance, they asked "Who inspires you?" and I replied, "Amos Jessup and Bruce La Wall are the most inspiring bad examples I know of. Their examples inspire me to continue the good habits and the prayerful, angelic ways I have followed since childhood." They asked, "How would you like to die?" and I said, "Well, certainly not screaming, 'Don't shoot! I'm just a jolly tinker!' like my Uncle." And they asked my motto, and I told them that it's, "If you ain't MOAB, you ain't shit."

Well, think about it for a minute. We understood what you meant, even with an implied double negative. Perhaps that should read "if you ain't MOAB, you ARE shit." That would cover Bush right there.

I just heard a thump. I think Gluon is out playing in the yard with Boson. They're moving so fast I can hardly see what they look like. I recognize Gluon's duck bill, of course, but what exactly is Boson shaped like?

Another bone-dry evening in Fort Worth. Not a drop of rain today, only a rather drying wind that knocked all of the leaves off of the poison ivy vines on the trees by the creek and distributed them on my back yard lawn. There they are, big healthy noxious looking leaves, in irregular triplicate, just waiting to drive the dog or me into an itching frenzy if we accidentally tangle with them.

Rapaire, tell Gluon she had better go play in Idaho for a few days, let these leaves dry up and blow away. Maybe she can retreive golf balls mid-flight. Drive those golfers nuts!

According to Wikipedia, boson include both gluons and photons,as well as Helium4 atoms. So Boson could look like Gluon or different. If Boson was from the Photon branch of the family he could be very bright and energetic. But incidental emissions of energy could be a problem, and shedding spare electrons from various collisions indoors.

OF course you do -- who can blame you with all this stress? Dogs, quarks, hurricanes on top of just plain Texas...it's a wonder you manage it all!

Now this nap will have, I suppose, a certain angular momentum equivalent to the Mu value of magnetic moment of the dream particles which your current state of consciousness resonate with; there's no predicting -- with all the variables involved in your beginning state of rest-in-flux, consciousness-wise-- which of these particles will resonate, and as a result, the momentum along the dream-time axis will be of unknown magnitude both as to velocity and direction of axis. Additionally the diameter of the sphere of dream activity along that axis will vary with the degree of force in the initial state modified by the filters through which that force is processed and their ratio of analytical, intuitive and reactionary vectors.. The end effect of all these variables is that when you wake up, you will at first not know where you are. The last nap I took, I was wandering down a boulevard in Japan and couldn't communicate with anyone!

A few minutes after this transition your usual coordinates will re-establish themselves and you can resume your "real"-time dynamics.

I don't know about that, but a couple of weeks ago I had a dream that I'd overslept, and though I was sure I was lying in bed at the moment I should be driving away from the house, couldn't figure out why I wasn't getting up and racing around the house getting the kids out the door for school. When I really woke up a few minutes later I wasn't sure WHAT time it was!

I'm not sure what time it is when I'm awake. Time, after all, is relative. For example, Amos is an hour behind me, while my brothers in Illinois are an hour ahead of me. Even someone standing to the east or west of where I am is experiencing a different time.

Of course, we're ignoring the question which time: sun, sidereal, or whatever. And it is quite concievable that, since time differs on a subatomic scale from the time we experience on "our" scale, so too could we be merely experiencing subatomic time for a much larger creation.

And we haven't yet even begun to discuss the effect that velocity and, perhaps, motion itself, has upon the time we experience. Thus, to say "A good time was had by all" is, at the very least, begging the question.

Not to mention that we experience everything in the past. In the time it takes for light and sound to pass from you to me, you may have disappeared. Even if I were to reach out and touch someone they might vanish in the time it takes for my nerve impulses to reach my brain.

Briefly put, I think that there's a 50-50 chance no one and no thing except for me exists at all.

OR that you yourself, Rapaire, are merely a wave of induction caused by back EMF amongst the fermions, and ian nstantaneous delusion of the finest sort, a shadow play cast upon the wall of Being by the will of others. Ya think?

I like BWL's description, but I had to look it up. It means "the study of very colorful animals who exist only at discrete energy levels of values that are multiples of 1/2h or of h itself for reasons not fully understood."

The reason I like this kind of animal is that I often feel like one myself, especially the "reasons not fully understood" part.

Needless to say, that should have been "Quantum Chromozoology", not "Quantam". "Quantam Chromozoology" is a totally different thing having nothing to do with subatomic physics at all. It's the study of the brightly colored animals kept as pets by the people who speak the lanquage in which "quantam" is a word.

I knew that. I was going to correct you, Bee-Dub, but I am far too well brought up to point out another's errors or, most especially, to chide the one who made the mistake. No, you may consider it past, over and done with, through, forgotten. I am not one to give another the finger of blame, no matter how silly their mistake might be. So don't give it another thought. And no matter what Amos says, you are forgiven.

But have created the science of studying them, or have we created them creatures themselves? following the fameous dictum "I think, therfore I am.", we have though about these creatures, and so are we responsible for them?

Mah goodness, Bunn, ain't you never heared nothing about fictons?? Day-GONE, they's jist like masons and mesons and bo'sons and gransons, only a lots more elemental as a partikel, ya see. Why, they's the stuff prit nere all the gummints in the whole wide world gummint on! And they shore as heck make up most of the US bujit and the UK parlymint, not to mention a lot of other, more injoyible, stuff.

Get Gluon to round up a herd of them there fictons and set them to death-ray frequencies and feed them to the fire ants. The fire ants will believe they have burned up and are but ashes, and will become tractable and harmless, in the way of ashes everywhere.

My Am Staffordshire Terrier just cornered a snake in the back yard. I heard the ruckus, and was just about to the point of going to see what she was up to when the new dog announced that I needed to go check. I put the backyard dog in the garage for a few minutes, moved a couple of boards and urged this stinky non-venomous critter to vamoose. This is the second snake I've seen her corner (and had to rescue) in as many weeks. The other dog has noticed wildlife also--she surprised (and was surprised by) a big toad in the front yard yesterday, and has also figured out that bunnies live out there and thinks bunny turds are a doggie m&ms.

At least these two local dogs won't blow the house off of its foundation like Gluon or Boson might.

I don't like the word "ficton". Well, I like it, but I don't like that it means a "fictional universe". Most of the other "____on" words refer to very small things, not very large ones like universes. Logically, "ficton" should mean the fundamental particle from which fiction is created. Just as visible matter is created from mesons, bosons, gluons and all those other ons, fiction should be created from fictons. It should take 11 fictons to ceate a lie, 132 fictons to create a whopper, 7,348,937 fictons to create the MOAB, and a quantity of fictons roughly equivalent to the number of subatomic particles in the Milky Way to justify the US invasion of Iraq.

That's exactly what it means to me, BWL. I dunno about this other definition, some illiterate neologism. Should be a fictiverse, I suppose, or a solipiction or something like that.

Fictons are what the square root of "I" is made of. They are the smallest particles of attention involved in creative output from a viewpoint.

They are composed of creatons, in turn. Creatons get filtered in the course of being generated through the available energy levels of an Identity, which by reason of its architecture cannot allow certain creatons to get through; to do so would destabilize the coherence of the universe and the contiguity and uniformity of space, and violate the fundamental contract of viewpoints inhabiting a shared space-time continuum.

Therefore only fictons and occasionally a few other random creatons get through. These are mostly unnoticeable until they reach critical mass at which point they create a new reality which varies in scale with the moment, magnitude, and timing of the critical mass.

In really good ones a whole new mass idea gets started. Harry Potter is a good example, as is the general theory of relativity.